She spent her days shuffling across the dacha’s worn parquet floors, yellow dusters under her carpet slippers, endlessly buffing the polished wood with her feet. I don’t remember that we ever ate with the other residents at the central restaurant block. This block served all the dachas of the elite and you could find every kind of caviar there and other delicacies on demand.

She triumphantly rejected the luxury, mainly foreign, goods we could have brought to the dacha from Moscow, and she and I would go instead into the forest, for mushrooms in the autumn or for berries to make jam in the summer.

We had the pleasing illusion of being self-sufficient when we were at Barvikha, and that illusion was what Nana trusted. She guarded this illusion closely in her jam making and mushroom picking. We lived in a country which was a concrete box of illusions within illusions, topped with barbed wire to protect us from reality, and no one knew that better than us.

My father and his colleagues in the SVR were the only ones in a position to see the truth, the disparity, and could compare us with the outside world.

Nana, like everyone else, had to find the source of her power elsewhere. She found it in the making of jam and cakes and bread, or foraging for mushrooms and berries.

‘The Party doesn’t control the wild things,’ she said.

‘What about the guard dogs?’ I asked her in childish innocence.

‘They’re not wild,’ she explained. ‘They’ve been brainwashed too.’

I was confused by this. Three times a week Nana scrubbed my body mercilessly, but the prospect of washing my brain too conjured up many nightmares later.

‘What about your cat then?’ I persisted.

‘She answers to no one,’ Nana replied.

And neither did Nana. She answered to no one. To me, she was as real as the bark of a tree, as real as stone, as rainwater. She was of the wild herself.